The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage Page B

them to argue that gays were a danger to kids when two gay men were fighting to adopt a kid no one wanted—especially a kid that had been so spectacularly endangered by his heterosexual parents. So when the anti-gayFamily Research Council spat out a press release about Adam, there was nothing in it about gay men being a danger to children, or morals, or gerbils, or anything else. Instead, there was only a deep concern for little Adam.
    “A child placed with two fathers will never be able to call out the word, ‘Mom,’ ” said FRC cultural studies director Robert Knight in the FRC's press release. While conservatives are typically opposed to the creation of new rights, the FRC read a brand new “right” into the Constitution: the right to a mommy. “The state is abrogating that child's right to a mother for the rest of his life.”
    When Elizabeth Birch, head of the gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign, adopted twins, Jacob and Anna, with her girlfriend Hilary Rosen, the Family Research Council spat out another press release, this time complaining about children being denied their right to daddies. “Placing babies in a lesbian household deliberately deprives these children of a father's love. . . . What kind of image of manhood and fatherhood will little Jacob obtain being raised by two lesbians? How will little Anna, who will never know the love of a father, relate to men someday?”
    There are many arguments Christian conservatives could make against gay adoption—Leviticus, Romans, Timothy—but the one they're opting to make these days is this every-child-has-a-right-to-a-mommy-and-daddy argument. Yet plenty of healthy children are raised in environments where they never get to call out “Mommy” or “Daddy.” Children are raised by their grandparents or aunts or uncles; they're raised by single dads and single moms. No FRC press release was issued when my next-door neighbor adopted a little girl who will never know the love of a father. The FRC isn't really all that interested in making sure every child has one parent of each gender. They're interested in preventing gays and lesbians from enjoying any of the rights straight people take for granted, and, of course, raising money by scaring little old ladies in Omaha with nightmare visions of children brought up in creepy, queer single-sex environments: little Adam's play group meeting in a gay bathhouse; little Anna having her hair braided by shirtless wimmin at the Michigan Women's Music Festival.
    Children adopted by gay or lesbian couples may not get to call out “Daddy” or “Mommy,” but they don't grow up in a single-gendered gay universe either. Gay men have mothers,sisters, and aunts; we have female friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Lesbians have fathers, brothers, and uncles, male friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Conscientious gay parents, like conscientious straight single parents, take steps to ensure their children have male and female role models.
    Opposition to gays and lesbians becoming parents isn't about kids, of course, it's about politics. While it's currently illegal for gays and lesbians to adopt only in Florida, the Christian right has pushed for bans on gay adoption in Texas, Indiana, Utah, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Governor of Texas George W. Bush went on the record in support of a ban on gay and lesbian adoptions in Texas, saying he believed “a traditional home with a mother and a father present should be the first choice for a child in need of home.” At the same time Bush endorsed mothers and fathers, Jeanne Shaheen, governor of New Hampshire, signed a bill repealing her state's twelve-year-old anti-gay adoption ban. Undoing the gay adoption ban “was good for New Hampshire and good for our children,” Shaheen said. On gay adoption, America could quickly break down into slave states and free states.
    Yet while gay adoption garners less support in public opinion polls than gay marriage, passing anti–gay adoption laws